Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2005 - 13

The Long Struggle for a
Toronto Opera House
By Paul Court
Rendering of the exterior of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
COURTESY DIAMOND AND SCHMITT ARCHITECTS. RENDERING BY AMD.
One of the regional sessions at the USITT
Conference & Stage Expo this coming March
is entitled "The Toronto Four Seasons Centre for
the Performing Arts: A Discussion of the Acoustics and Theatre Systems." Hidden behind that
innocuous title is a fourty-five-year saga of
alternating hopes and disappointments that
has-at long last-led to the construction
of Canada's first dedicated full-scale opera
house, which will open in the fall of 2006.
The Canadian Opera Company, the owner of
the new venue, was founded in 1950. In the early
1960s it moved its performance seasons to the
new O'Keefe Centre, which had the technical facilities and audience capacity that suited a growing opera company. The 3,200-seat theatre was
typical of many large venues built in the middle
years of this century: a fan-shaped auditorium
with immense surfaces, lots of concrete, and a
Modernist charm that has not aged well.
Similar behemoths from that era dot the
North American landscape, and to many they
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represent the nadir of auditorium design. In
the late fifties and early sixties, the design of
traditional theatres and opera houses was often discarded in favor of new architectural and
acoustical theories that were not, as it turned
out, sufficiently advanced to match the empirical wisdom of the builders of earlier theatres.
In the following decade we started to re-examine the theatres of much earlier eras in an attempt to incorporate their architectural virtues
into the next generation of performance
spaces. Of course, it is in the nature of the pendulum that by the nineties, auditoriums that
recreated the deep horseshoe shape of the
eighteenth century were in vogue-to the chagrin of technical directors trying to mask latetwentieth-century sets.
But forty-five years later, the O'Keefe-
now called the Hummingbird Centre-is still
Toronto's largest venue and has, throughout its
history, served as the principal performance
space for its major tenants, the Canadian Opera
Company and the National Ballet Of Canada.
Since the O'Keefe was built strictly as a road
house, the two companies have had to maintain all their production facilities and offices
elsewhere, and these eventually spread among
more and more buildings in different parts of
the city as staff and scale of production grew.
The performance space also had a big
problem: the acoustics were simply appalling.
Its particular issues have been featured in several books and papers by sound designers and
acousticians over the years, and as the science